And you do still visually check to ensure that they haven't changed the document right? PDF can be edited and if someone is really out to screw you, it can be done in a manner that doesn't make it obvious unless you run a checksum on the file or read the words.
Where I live there is an extreme shortage of Math and Science teachers. The state has set standards (mandatory 4 years of math and science in high school to graduate) that put a strain on the teaching pool. Add to that the fact that all teachers must be certified to teach in that area in order to be in compliance with NCLB and other various mandates and you get an even more extreme shortage.
Given the cost of obtaining a math / engineering / science degree just to teach, this is something that could possibly encourage more people to go into those areas of teaching.
I might even consider going back for a teaching degree if I could do so without incurring additional debt.
Re:This is (now) a famous number-theory integer!
on
Censoring a Number
·
· Score: 1
I found this interesting and have posted it on my blog. I hope you don't mind.
So what happens if someone buys an add on a billboard and all it has is this seemingly random string? What happens when bumper stickers appear with this seemingly random string? T-Shirts? Spam? What happens when the whole world knows your secret and the DMCA can't protect you? What happens when the few tell the many?
Information has always been, will always want to be, and will always be free.
Ripped from an email in response to a fax that I sent concerning copyright issues / problems. It may be a form response, but who knows, maybe somebody is paying attention.
>>>>>>
Thank you for contacting me regarding copyright protection. I welcome your thoughts and comments on this issue.
Copyright protection has been central to America's prosperity and job creation. Movies, books, computer software, television, photography and music are among our unique American products and some of our most successful exports. United States industries depending on copyright protection employ nearly 4 million workers and produce over $65 billion of our exports ( more than agriculture and automobile manufacturing.
Protecting content in a high-technology age is a new and daunting problem, and copyright protection is an important challenge as the broadband revolution offers even more far-reaching possibilities and opportunities. With new speed and interactivity, the entire store of movies, music, books, television and raw knowledge can be made widely available. I believe copyright protection is a foundation of innovation, and copyright law should work to ultimately protect the best interests of consumers. Intellectual property is the creative core of the information age, and I agree this is a pivotal issue for Congress to address.
I appreciate hearing from you and hope you will not hesitate to keep in touch on any issue of concern to you.
A little under a year ago I took a position as the sole webmaster with one of the largest public school districts in Texas. When I took this job, they used Dreamweaver and IE for everything, browser be damned. Within 3 months, I had rolled out a new design that was at least usable in IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Netscape. I am constantly encouraging the usage of Firefox and doing everything I can to point out how flawed the concept is to expect the entire world to use IE.
According to our stats, 90% of our users are on IE with 40% of those being IE7, 7% on Firefox, and 2% on Safari. We serve upwards of 10,000 visitors per day with more than 30,000 pageviews. We don't have to support anyone or anything but we (as in I) choose to do so because not doing so reflects stupidity and arrogance. Being in the business of education, I find it is very necessary to educate the general public (your typical IE / windows user) that they are using an insecure and non-standard browser while still offering to support them until they are comfortable making the change to something better.
The organization that I am presently a part of is heavily invested in Word, Groupwise, and Novell. All three of which are bloated and tend to cause more support problems than they actually solve. The group that I work with doesn't answer to the rest of the IT organization and we tend to do our own thing. Since we, there are two of us in a group of ten in an organization of over eleven thousand, are responsible for the organizations web presence we tend to look for free and open software. In some instances we must use non-free or non-open software. Once such instance is interactive forms. We have chosen to use Adobe PDF Forms because many of our users are of the lowest common denominator and being able to just send them the form just works.
The only thing that I see Microsoft doing is presenting the perfect opportunity for products such as Open Office to step in and take over. As I said to a co-worker, Office 2007 will require you to learn a new user interface so why not switch to Open Office?
Greeting cards, well, that depends on what they use now as to what they will be familiar with. A quick google pulled up Scribus which looks interesting but may be fairly complex.
Family tree software also depends on what they use. There are a few out there, but I can't attest to how well they work.
As many have already said before...Does this mean that any and all stolen (as if) music that is found to be on my ipod (note, I don't have one yet) would then be considered legit?
Or is this just yet another example of some suit who doesn't understand the reality of the digital world?
Just this last week I went out and purchased a CD (My first in many, many, many years) which I inspected before I ever walked away from the rack with it to ensure that there was no DRM. Why? Because I know how I listen to music...XM or MP3. The first thing I did when I got home was to plop the CD into the drive on my linux box and rip it to mp3. The CD, I'm not even sure where it is at the moment. The mp3 files are on the external 250GB Hard Drive in my laptop bag and on the external 250GB Hard Drive attached to the desktop computer. I won't touch the CD ever unless I have a complete drive melt-down and need to rebuild my music collection.
The point being that I didn't steal them and everyone who I know that owns an ipod paid for the music that they have.
Subfloor? I had a bathroom that was similar to that in an old rent house I lived in a few years back. Had to pull up the whole damn thing down to the supports. Nothing like asbestos to get the blood flowing.
Patent xxxxxWhoCares Granted for DMCA Where DMCA is a system or method for preventing advances in technology while also suppressing free speech.
Patent xxxxxWhoCares Granted for RIAA Where RIAA is a system or method for extracting monetary value from useless waste and / or preventing said useless from being removed in a safe and proper fashion.
Patent xxxxxWhoCares Granted for MPAA Where MPAA is a system or method for disguising packet sniffing as a research project designed to provide high-speed data transfer.
So if I patent all the acronyms for each and every one of the big players would this make it possible for me to claim patent infringement? If so, I think it's time I spoke with my lawyer.
I haven't bought Microsoft since....late 1996 maybe? And I no longer recommend it either. For most people, a nice clean Fedora 3 Install will meet their needs and then some.
My partner and I are in the process of developing a self-updating system designed for use as a business-class server. It will provide VPN, DNS, Email, Web, and MySQL Services for small to medium-sized businesses. It will be capable of communicating with other servers (ours of course) to share the services (think of Replication and Load Balancing on Demand).
The purpose being a plug-it-in and let-it-play system to provide IT Solutions to company's without the desire to create an IT Department or IT Budget.
>Creating a commercial product dedicated directly to putting MS out of business is obviously asking for trouble. But is also beyond the lone coder.
What about creating an OS to compete with MS Windows? Wouldn't this be directly competing with MS?
It doesn't have much to do with competing with a company unless they have been successful in patenting either a business method or software method which are both entirely bogus and I can probably dig up a crayon drawing which would demonstrate my prior art to many software patents (don't ask).
My point being is that patents are just another way of making money and the best way to get around them is to prove that you had the idea first. Most of my code from college would demonstrate this.
The LoneCoder is not dead. We have just chosen to retreat into the darkness and plan our next offensive. Time to break out the dot matrix.
Getting people to change their political views would be a waste of time.
Your right. Which is why I don't try to get them to change. But getting a red or a blue to even show concern that there might be voting problems, not just evoting, is nearly impossible.
And you have addressed another flaw in the system. The conception of a 2 party system is a dilution of reality. The fact that everyone is lumped into either being a liberal or a conservative, a republican or a democrat, a red or a blue is just wrong.
See, the lovely thing here is that this whole issue is just going to fade away because people by and large aren't sophisticated enough to realize that voter fraud can be taking place unless they see people squinting at punchcard ballots. And the media ain't going to look into it for the exact same reasons.
It has more to do with the dispersal rate of the geek community. I live in a red state where the majority of my colleagues (non-technical persons) lean to the far red side of things. I'm more purple and tend to dislike both sides of the coin but convincing any of the reds into even a fuschia state of mind would result in a complete melt-down.
We are already over-taxed. Adding another tax is quite frankly just a little much don't ya think?
I get taxed on the money that I make (income taxes). I get taxed on the money that I spend (federal and state sales tax). I get taxed for services (phone, internet, cable).
I pay out the backside for my general services (gas, electric, water) which are all monopolized.
I see no point in taxing a service (which is what VOIP is) just to pad the wallets of yet another government black hole.
On the other hand, if the finances of tax system where open to public scrutiny and I could actually see where the $20 that I pay for my local phone service actually goes then I might think it necessary.
Of course, the chance of the phone company actually admitting that they collect more fees than what is actually required for the USF charges each month isn't likely to happen in this lifetime.
Just what are they really measuring?
on
IT Literacy Test
·
· Score: 1
After RTFA it would seem that is simply another version of your standard can you use product X. I may have missed it, but where do they actually test anything other than your ability to communicate using technology?
I'm pretty sure that most "postsecondary students" are up to par on communicating with technology. I'm more concerned with the degredation that has resulted from "postsecondary students" using IM and SMS technology to communicate.
NASA intends to use the neural map of his brain to build the next supercomputer in order to regain the top spot and predict the outcome of all Jeopardy games until 3025.
I know of several Republicans who voted for Bush who claim to hold dear the fact that the Constitution should not be changed, especially by adding a ban on gay marriage. Unfortunately these so-called educational elites failed to pay attention when Bush was screaming for just a ban and continues to do so. These are the people who elected Bush. Not the moral majority.
And here's a simple system to eliminate the possibility of fraud.
1. Create a national database. Oh wait, one exists...Social Security Numbers.
2. Make results of all votes available to everyone via the web. This will allow anyone to check and see if the vote that they cast was actually counted as they intended. This also allows for immediate scrutiny to verify the results.
3. Investigate all "anomolies". Don't leave anything to chance. In the real world there shouldn't be any anomolies with an election system. If there are then there is an obvious issue.
Why not create a national voter registry where all votes are uploaded / tabulated and available for review. Votes are tied to a voter id (unique to the individual) and can be reviewed by anyone. This would guarantee that at bare minimum the average joe / jane could verify that his / her vote was at least registered as they intended. It would also lend itself towards removing any chance of fraud or tampering.
I used a paper ballot but I still have no way of knowing for sure if my vote actually counted as the paper ballot is converted into an electronic request using opti-scan technology and presumably transmitted to a central server somewhere to be tallied.
Slashdot Mirror
And you do still visually check to ensure that they haven't changed the document right? PDF can be edited and if someone is really out to screw you, it can be done in a manner that doesn't make it obvious unless you run a checksum on the file or read the words.
Where I live there is an extreme shortage of Math and Science teachers. The state has set standards (mandatory 4 years of math and science in high school to graduate) that put a strain on the teaching pool. Add to that the fact that all teachers must be certified to teach in that area in order to be in compliance with NCLB and other various mandates and you get an even more extreme shortage.
Given the cost of obtaining a math / engineering / science degree just to teach, this is something that could possibly encourage more people to go into those areas of teaching.
I might even consider going back for a teaching degree if I could do so without incurring additional debt.
I found this interesting and have posted it on my blog. I hope you don't mind.
So what happens if someone buys an add on a billboard and all it has is this seemingly random string? What happens when bumper stickers appear with this seemingly random string? T-Shirts? Spam? What happens when the whole world knows your secret and the DMCA can't protect you? What happens when the few tell the many?
Information has always been, will always want to be, and will always be free.
Ripped from an email in response to a fax that I sent concerning copyright issues / problems. It may be a form response, but who knows, maybe somebody is paying attention.
>>>>>>
Thank you for contacting me regarding copyright protection. I welcome your thoughts and comments on this issue.
Copyright protection has been central to America's prosperity and job creation. Movies, books, computer software, television, photography and music are among our unique American products and some of our most successful exports. United States industries depending on copyright protection employ nearly 4 million workers and produce over $65 billion of our exports ( more than agriculture and automobile manufacturing.
Protecting content in a high-technology age is a new and daunting problem, and copyright protection is an important challenge as the broadband revolution offers even more far-reaching possibilities and opportunities. With new speed and interactivity, the entire store of movies, music, books, television and raw knowledge can be made widely available. I believe copyright protection is a foundation of innovation, and copyright law should work to ultimately protect the best interests of consumers. Intellectual property is the creative core of the information age, and I agree this is a pivotal issue for Congress to address.
I appreciate hearing from you and hope you will not hesitate to keep in touch on any issue of concern to you.
Sincerely, Kay Bailey Hutchison
A little under a year ago I took a position as the sole webmaster with one of the largest public school districts in Texas. When I took this job, they used Dreamweaver and IE for everything, browser be damned. Within 3 months, I had rolled out a new design that was at least usable in IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Netscape. I am constantly encouraging the usage of Firefox and doing everything I can to point out how flawed the concept is to expect the entire world to use IE.
According to our stats, 90% of our users are on IE with 40% of those being IE7, 7% on Firefox, and 2% on Safari. We serve upwards of 10,000 visitors per day with more than 30,000 pageviews. We don't have to support anyone or anything but we (as in I) choose to do so because not doing so reflects stupidity and arrogance. Being in the business of education, I find it is very necessary to educate the general public (your typical IE / windows user) that they are using an insecure and non-standard browser while still offering to support them until they are comfortable making the change to something better.
If they offered in-flight daycare, most parents would check them just to get a break.
The organization that I am presently a part of is heavily invested in Word, Groupwise, and Novell. All three of which are bloated and tend to cause more support problems than they actually solve. The group that I work with doesn't answer to the rest of the IT organization and we tend to do our own thing. Since we, there are two of us in a group of ten in an organization of over eleven thousand, are responsible for the organizations web presence we tend to look for free and open software. In some instances we must use non-free or non-open software. Once such instance is interactive forms. We have chosen to use Adobe PDF Forms because many of our users are of the lowest common denominator and being able to just send them the form just works.
The only thing that I see Microsoft doing is presenting the perfect opportunity for products such as Open Office to step in and take over. As I said to a co-worker, Office 2007 will require you to learn a new user interface so why not switch to Open Office?
The first customer is Slartibartfast. Repeat after me, Slartibartfast.
GAIM for IM. There are others as well.
Greeting cards, well, that depends on what they use now as to what they will be familiar with. A quick google pulled up Scribus which looks interesting but may be fairly complex.
Family tree software also depends on what they use. There are a few out there, but I can't attest to how well they work.
As many have already said before...Does this mean that any and all stolen (as if) music that is found to be on my ipod (note, I don't have one yet) would then be considered legit?
Or is this just yet another example of some suit who doesn't understand the reality of the digital world?
Just this last week I went out and purchased a CD (My first in many, many, many years) which I inspected before I ever walked away from the rack with it to ensure that there was no DRM. Why? Because I know how I listen to music...XM or MP3. The first thing I did when I got home was to plop the CD into the drive on my linux box and rip it to mp3. The CD, I'm not even sure where it is at the moment. The mp3 files are on the external 250GB Hard Drive in my laptop bag and on the external 250GB Hard Drive attached to the desktop computer. I won't touch the CD ever unless I have a complete drive melt-down and need to rebuild my music collection.
The point being that I didn't steal them and everyone who I know that owns an ipod paid for the music that they have.
Subfloor? I had a bathroom that was similar to that in an old rent house I lived in a few years back. Had to pull up the whole damn thing down to the supports. Nothing like asbestos to get the blood flowing.
Patent xxxxxWhoCares Granted for DMCA
Where DMCA is a system or method for preventing advances in technology while also suppressing free speech.
Patent xxxxxWhoCares Granted for RIAA
Where RIAA is a system or method for extracting monetary value from useless waste and / or preventing said useless from being removed in a safe and proper fashion.
Patent xxxxxWhoCares Granted for MPAA
Where MPAA is a system or method for disguising packet sniffing as a research project designed to provide high-speed data transfer.
So if I patent all the acronyms for each and every one of the big players would this make it possible for me to claim patent infringement? If so, I think it's time I spoke with my lawyer.
I haven't bought Microsoft since....late 1996 maybe? And I no longer recommend it either. For most people, a nice clean Fedora 3 Install will meet their needs and then some.
My partner and I are in the process of developing a self-updating system designed for use as a business-class server. It will provide VPN, DNS, Email, Web, and MySQL Services for small to medium-sized businesses. It will be capable of communicating with other servers (ours of course) to share the services (think of Replication and Load Balancing on Demand).
The purpose being a plug-it-in and let-it-play system to provide IT Solutions to company's without the desire to create an IT Department or IT Budget.
>Creating a commercial product dedicated directly to putting MS out of business is obviously asking for trouble. But is also beyond the lone coder.
What about creating an OS to compete with MS Windows? Wouldn't this be directly competing with MS?
It doesn't have much to do with competing with a company unless they have been successful in patenting either a business method or software method which are both entirely bogus and I can probably dig up a crayon drawing which would demonstrate my prior art to many software patents (don't ask).
My point being is that patents are just another way of making money and the best way to get around them is to prove that you had the idea first. Most of my code from college would demonstrate this.
The LoneCoder is not dead. We have just chosen to retreat into the darkness and plan our next offensive. Time to break out the dot matrix.
Getting people to change their political views would be a waste of time.
Your right. Which is why I don't try to get them to change. But getting a red or a blue to even show concern that there might be voting problems, not just evoting, is nearly impossible.
And you have addressed another flaw in the system. The conception of a 2 party system is a dilution of reality. The fact that everyone is lumped into either being a liberal or a conservative, a republican or a democrat, a red or a blue is just wrong.
See, the lovely thing here is that this whole issue is just going to fade away because people by and large aren't sophisticated enough to realize that voter fraud can be taking place unless they see people squinting at punchcard ballots. And the media ain't going to look into it for the exact same reasons.
It has more to do with the dispersal rate of the geek community. I live in a red state where the majority of my colleagues (non-technical persons) lean to the far red side of things. I'm more purple and tend to dislike both sides of the coin but convincing any of the reds into even a fuschia state of mind would result in a complete melt-down.
Time to switch parties and reign in all those extra powers Bush gave himself.
We are already over-taxed. Adding another tax is quite frankly just a little much don't ya think?
I get taxed on the money that I make (income taxes).
I get taxed on the money that I spend (federal and state sales tax).
I get taxed for services (phone, internet, cable).
I pay out the backside for my general services (gas, electric, water) which are all monopolized.
I see no point in taxing a service (which is what VOIP is) just to pad the wallets of yet another government black hole.
On the other hand, if the finances of tax system where open to public scrutiny and I could actually see where the $20 that I pay for my local phone service actually goes then I might think it necessary.
Of course, the chance of the phone company actually admitting that they collect more fees than what is actually required for the USF charges each month isn't likely to happen in this lifetime.
After RTFA it would seem that is simply another version of your standard can you use product X. I may have missed it, but where do they actually test anything other than your ability to communicate using technology?
I'm pretty sure that most "postsecondary students" are up to par on communicating with technology. I'm more concerned with the degredation that has resulted from "postsecondary students" using IM and SMS technology to communicate.
NASA intends to use the neural map of his brain to build the next supercomputer in order to regain the top spot and predict the outcome of all Jeopardy games until 3025.
I know of several Republicans who voted for Bush who claim to hold dear the fact that the Constitution should not be changed, especially by adding a ban on gay marriage. Unfortunately these so-called educational elites failed to pay attention when Bush was screaming for just a ban and continues to do so. These are the people who elected Bush. Not the moral majority.
And here's a simple system to eliminate the possibility of fraud.
1. Create a national database. Oh wait, one exists...Social Security Numbers.
2. Make results of all votes available to everyone via the web. This will allow anyone to check and see if the vote that they cast was actually counted as they intended. This also allows for immediate scrutiny to verify the results.
3. Investigate all "anomolies". Don't leave anything to chance. In the real world there shouldn't be any anomolies with an election system. If there are then there is an obvious issue.
Here's an idea...
Why not create a national voter registry where all votes are uploaded / tabulated and available for review. Votes are tied to a voter id (unique to the individual) and can be reviewed by anyone. This would guarantee that at bare minimum the average joe / jane could verify that his / her vote was at least registered as they intended. It would also lend itself towards removing any chance of fraud or tampering.
I used a paper ballot but I still have no way of knowing for sure if my vote actually counted as the paper ballot is converted into an electronic request using opti-scan technology and presumably transmitted to a central server somewhere to be tallied.